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Poetry

I was truly impressed and honored to have a chance to hear Alice Walker, one of the South’s most significant living writers, deliver a touching speech on Thursday night at the University of Pacific. Alice Walker begins by talking about the Black National Anthem. This song, she says, acknowledges the suffering of African American. She concludes that everyone in this world suffers, no matter what race you are, but the most important thing is to not give up and try to overcome whatever obstacles you are facing. She continues by talking about how her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history and the brutality of rural black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. In her writings she like to prose alternations, show the realities and show how things are what they are, and that things happen for a reason. Walker wants everyone to acknowledge and properly respect that many African-American had endured incredible hardships in their efforts to survive in a hostile environment. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships.
After talking briefly about some of her work, she begins to share with the audience how she became a writer. Her beginning as a writer was in the small rural town of Eatonton, Georgia, where she was the youngest of eight children of impoverished sharecroppers. She explains that when she was seventeen she sat in front of the bus on her way to Atlanta, Georgia to attend Spelman, a college for black women. However, a white woman refused to let Walker sit near her because of her skin color, so the bus driver forced her to sit on the back of the bus. That experienced caused her to join student movements and to write about the difficulties that African Americans faced. When she writes, he d...